Monday, March 14, 2005

Study shows online citations don't age well

Today's Edupage by Educause contains a story about a study conducted by two academics at Iowa State University about online citations. The study "looked at five prestigious communication-studies journals from 2000 to 2003 and found 1,126 footnotes that cite online resources. Of those, 373 did not work at all, a decay rate of 33 percent; of those that worked, only 424 took users to information relevant to the citation." The original article was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2005 (subscription required). The Edupage archives are available here.

1 comment:

lislemck said...

Whoa! All that time spent of citation style for online sources, and less than half of the time you get to information relevant to the citation? It blows my mind. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised--in the last two days I've chased newspaper articles with full citations that didn't appear in the electronic resources for those newspapers.

I'm finding this blog a great resource--thanks!